Animation Manifesto

In my 20th Century Art Class we've been covering the Furturists and the Futurist Manifesto. Our professor told us all to write our own Manifesto in regards to our craft or what we're here in school for. This idea actually really inspired me and in the future I'd like to elaborate a little more on this idea.

I love taking the time every once in a while to sit down and really think about all the reasons why I'm doing what I do. Why I love animation and wanted to do it in the first place.

As a shortened version of everything that I'd like to cover on this later, here's the Manifesto that I wrote in class as well as some other ideas I thought of that I would like to compile.

I make animation. I make it to tell a story visually. Instead of telling a story in one image as a painter or photographer, I tell it in hundreds of images that flash before people's eyes in mere seconds. I tell a story through time. I want to entertain an audience and take them on a journey with moving images. Unlike film, they are images created from nothing. It is from a drawing, a digital cube, pixels, or multiple materials that these images form and then are compiled together to create movement and emotion. To me that is beautiful. Every frame of animation is created with so much time and care an yet if you blink, you'll miss it. It's work that goes unnoticed but in its entirety creates a story and can make an audience feel or understand a message. It creates nostalgia and memories that stay with people for years.

Lines on paper can make an entire audience laugh. Moving pixels can make them cry. This idea fascinates me and is what I love about animation. Something that is essentially not even real or tangible can make people feel so much.

I want to entertain. My entire life I've been a storyteller. I want to make people laugh and the goal of animation is to make an audience feel something and that is exactly what I want to do. I was always a quiet kid growing up. I said very little, but I always felt like I had a good sense of humor. I was always able to make my friends and family laugh out loud with the stories I wrote and the comics I created when I was a teenager. This reaction is what warms my soul and makes me want to do what I do. There's no better feeling to me than seeing people have such a positive reaction to my work, whether it be laughing or crying. It astounded me when my peers in high school told me they'd never seen me smile because I always felt like I was laughing constantly. Perhaps my humor was just hard to understand because I wasn't like the class clown who was calling out and jumping up and down in school. All of my humor was delivered through writing and drawing. Animation acts as a non-verbal for of storytelling. There are many animated films out there that include no dialogue at all and yet they can entertain an audience just as well. This is yet another aspect of animation that makes it so special to me.